MENSTRUATION MATTERS

Excerpt from Out for Blood: Essays on Menstruation and Resistance, by Breanne Fahs SUNY Press, November, 2016 In 2012 Petra Collins, an outspoken artist and activist, designed a t-shirt for American Apparel that depicted a hairy menstruating vulva with fingers spreading open the labia. As a piece of agitprop, this shirt successfully provoked a firestorm of angry responses. ...

Bleeding on Donald Trump’s Face Recent events in the political circus of the Republican party have highlighted Donald Trump’s disdain for women and his overwhelming tendencies to embarrass himself and his “party.” In an interesting twist of events, menstrual cycles have started to play a major role in how women are rebelling against Trump’s unbridled misogyny. After suggesting that Fox...

On June 7, we posted a video of slam poet Dominique Christina performing a poem combating men’s shaming of women and their menstrual cycles. In the “Period Poem,” which she dedicated to her daughter, Christina encourages women who are confronted by men’s negativity toward menstruation to bleed, and bleed, and bleed on everything he loves. It is a fierce,...

In the past few weeks, I’ve been reflecting quite a lot about feminist rage, in part because I recently participated in a panel at New York University about feminist rage with philosopher Avital Ronell, American Studies scholar Lisa Duggan, and performance artist Karen Finley. In celebration of my new book, the first-ever biography of Valerie Solanas entitled Valerie Solanas: The...

As a point of contention and as a reaction to my previous claims that women should more often engage in “menstrual outing,” some critics have responded by saying that disclosing one’s menstrual status is similar to women disclosing that they have just urinated, defecated, or vomited. In my November 2012 column called “Menstrual outing, menstrual panics,” here are some of...

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About Us

We are researchers in the social sciences, the natural sciences and the humanities, health care providers, policy makers, health activists, artists and students from a wide range of fields with interests in the role of menstrual and ovulatory health across the life span.